Saturday, April 21, 2007

The fourth commandment, “remembering the sabbath,” is another one that secularists strain to comprehend. They assume that it is not universal, and that it has only some idiosyncratic meaning for Jews, Christians, and Ozzy Osbourne fans. But like the other commandments, it has a literal meaning, a moral meaning, a symbolic meaning, and an esoteric meaning.

In his attack on meaning, the irreligious secularist cannot help but to extend the attack to time. Ritual has to do with the sacralization of time; or, more specifically, with not regarding it as mere duration, but as a portal for energies from the eternal to enter the herebelow. Since we live at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal, a literal interpretation of "sabbath consciousness" involves the idea of taking one day a week to leave the field of time and to emphasize verticality, or eternity.

But since the commandment is a universal archetype embodied in a particular religion, we needn't be overly concerned with this or that particular interpretation and application of the idea. More important is that you understand the principle and apply it to your life in some form or fashion, so that you occasionally unplug from the horizontal bewilderness and reconnect with your vertical source and destiny.

Now, what does the nihilist say about all this? What can he say? Since his first three commandments already condemn him to a godless and meaningless existence, what does it matter what you do -- or when you it -- with the time that has been given to you to perfect yourself? The only alternative to meaning is either chaos or enforced order. As such, these two extremes represent the two poles of the Democratic party. One pole is the enraged and infantile base, the primitive dailykos and moveonon.org types: the chaoticians, nihilists, barbarians, and infrahumans, while the other pole is the elites whom they empower in order to control themselves and everyone else -- the Clintons, Edwards, Gores, and Obamas.

(I say "infrahuman" because leftists do not recognize humans as fundamentally distinct from animals, and therefore do not make the effort to actualize this uniquely quasi-divine station. They are anything but humanists, because theirs' is the explicit philosophy of the animalization of the human, and all the consequences that flow from that. You may not think it is fair or illustrative, but Alec Baldwin's abuse of his daughter is a case in point. The leftist foregoes the task of mastering himself in favor of ceding his power to the collective, which he hopes will control him -- in particular, his greed, his envy, and his paranoia and malevolence toward his fellow man. Obviously, Alec Baldwin is "out of control," as are the majority of narcissistic Hollywoodenheads. It is rare that you would ever say of one, "ah, now here is a man who has mastered himself!" No. It is almost always the opposite. The less mastery, the further left; the list is endless.)

For the classical liberal, the very task of this life is to transcend and perfect oneself by first mastering oneself. To say that there is not a trace of this attitude in leftism is an understatement, for it is rooted in the opposite premise: that there is no such thing as self-mastery (only "repression"), so you must be controlled by the state, by a powerful collective. A nation of virtuous people living in the light of their own awakened conscience would not even require laws. Obviously, fallen humans being what they are, such an ideal state is not feasible, because it takes only a few irresponsible jerks to upset the whole balance. It's like the freeways -- you can have thousands of responsible drivers spontaneously interacting in a harmonious manner, but just one accident by some idiot will snarl the traffic and inconvenience everyone else.

Thus, leftism inevitably redounds to a situation in which inferior men rule the superior men, in part because the superior man has no interest in dominating others. This is the real reason why there are so very few conservatives in politics, because politics draws from people who wish to control others, and a conservative has no desire to exercise this kind of power as a replacement for self-mastery. And this is why virtually every professional group has been taken over by leftist activists, whether it is the educational establishment, the state department, the American Bar Association, the MSMistry of Truth, academia, or my idiotic group, the American Psychological Association -- it doesn't matter, for the principle is the same: the authorization of a kind of external power to control others as a substitute for the liberal doctrine of self-mastery.

For example, I and everyone else have to pay a ridiculous amount of money into the inefficient social security system because of the weakness, fecklessness, and irresponsibility of those who refuse to plan for their future. As always, leftist ideas have "good intentions," but the result is the institution of a system of incentives that rewards irresponsibility, denial of the future, and a focus on the present. How can this not contribute to people in general being less responsible with their money, purchasing things they don't need, and going into debt with credit cards?

A big part of the problem is that, once you have despiritualized a people, they will have a gigantic hole in the center of their being, which they will then attempt to fill either with material objects or with "thrills." It also creates the cult of celebrity, for celebrity is sort of insane replacement for being known by God. Or to put it in the reverse, no one who is known by God -- and therefore, ipso facto, knows God -- cares if they are known by a bunch of anonymous strangers. You cannot actually become a somebody through sufficient adulation by a mob of nobodies. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

Consider last Monday's mass murderer. He was a nothing, a nobody, a non-entity who was a non-entity by virtue of the fact that, for whatever reason, he was devoid of self mastery. He is obviously an extreme case. However, one thing I learned during my internship at Camarillo State Mental Hospital is that government employees are more dysfunctional than the patients. But the other thing I learned is that the most disturbed patients can provide a lot of insight into the less disturbed among us. This is because they have the same pathology, so to speak, only in an extremely vivid and exaggerated form.

Yesterday I linked to a provocative but entirely fair piece at American Thinker entitled Who Taught Cho to Hate? I believe it is fair, because some insane individuals will imbibe the ubiquitous message that the United States is a fundamentally corrupt place ruled by wealthy elites, and find justification to open fire on them. Others, such as Alec Baldwin, who are less psychotic but equally morally insane, will spout nonsense about President Bush being a murderer while engaging in the soul murder of their own child. It would be fascinating to know what Baldwin has taught his daughter about "evil conservatives" and "good liberals" such as himself. She's going to grow up either very confused or very clear about what motivates the angry and immature liberal.

Lewis asks, "was Cho taught to hate?":

"Whatever he learned in his classes -- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently -- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?"

The answer "is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated." Instead of acting as surrogate parents to help usher these young adults to emotional, moral, and intellectual maturity, these professors literally do the opposite: the VT English Department is not "a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words 'civilized behaviors' are ridiculed -- at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here."

It is simply an unconscionable scandal that one can spend a fortune on an education at an elite university and never once be presented with any of the key ideas of classical liberalism or of genuine humanism. Instead, you will be taught to rationalize your own failures and to hate America for them. What you do with that hatred is up to you. Some may become activists who make it their goal to master and control others, while some may become academics in order to vampirically "put the bite" on the next generation of young adults and convert them to this sinister ideology. But in any event, you will leave college no more a "finished" human being than you were when you entered -- and probably come away with the idea that there is nothing to "finish" except for the revolution to displace the human being.

Plus, you will have been exposed to many ideas that shouldn't even be thought, much less taught. At Belmont Club there is an article discussing this, entitled Deliver Us From Evil, in which Mr. Club writes that

"As a child I was taught one could 'sin through thought, word and deed'. Somewhere in the intervening years society seems to have forgotten about the 'sins' of thought and word largely because it refused to believe in taboos. There were, the school chaplains used to say, dark doors beyond which it was dangerous for the mind to go. There were thoughts you could not think -- unless you were strong enough to wrestle with what you would find beyond the portal.

"Pedophilia, bestiality, extreme cruelty, monstrous behavior -- these are no longer ideas which we dare not entertain or cast out of our minds should they fleet through our consciousness out of the fear of 'sin'. No. Pedophilia has itself become a cause for enlightened people... Instead we have cast out the idea of sin itself and made the conception of sin as sin our only societal taboo."

There is a civil war in this country between human and anti-human ideologies. You might say that one aims for the transcendent goal of humanness, while the other abolishes the category altogether and therefore makes its achievement impossible.

*****

Did we get sidetracked, or can this be tied together with the fourth commandment of nihilism, which is forget the sabbath, because time has no vertical dimension anyway. And if time does not have a vertical dimension, then there is no developmental time, and therefore no telos for human beings -- nothing to achieve, no measurement of human maturity. We are all Alec Baldwin, who has often expressed interest in running for office. Then others can share in the feeling of what it is like to have such a beast for a father: a man who cannot even master a child. No, not his child -- which is what he imagines -- but his own childishness. The out-of-control child evokes the heavy-handed governmental parent who will coerce and control him as a substitute for self-mastery.

*****

And here is some of what I wrote about the fourth commandment last year. It also applies:

In order to understand this commandment, we must go back to the very beginning of Genesis, where God eternally “creates the heavens and the earth.” In the esoteric view, this refers to the continuous separation of the vertical (heaven, eternity, the Absolute) and horizontal (earth, time, the relative world). So long as we are in the horizontal -- the horizontal alone -- we are indeed “strangers in this world.” In the absence of the vertical, life is a sort of absurd hell, or at best, a meaningless pleasure palace in which we should mindlessly pursue our lusts and desires until crying time. “A raging animal inside of a dying carcass,” as I believe I once heard Alan Watts put it.

But “remembering the sabbath” has to do with vertical recollection, and cultivating the leisure necessary to achieve it. It is literally re-membering, for it involves rejoining our ground of being before things get too out of hand. It is possible to get so lost in the horizontal -- one’s life can become so complex and convoluted -- that it is difficult to find one’s way back to that OMnipresent hole in creation known as the sabbath.

For the sabbath ultimately represents a shorthand way of discussing those little springs that dot the landscape of being, through which vertical energies bubble forth from the ground. Every night, before going to sleep, I make it a point to remember how and where I drank from one of these springs during the day. No matter how difficult my day, I can almost always remember some point at which I was “given my daily bread,” so to speak -- some point at which the vertical energies shone through and nourished me. Come to think of it, it often happens while making one of these little morning raids on the wild godhead. It’s a big reason I write them. I wake up looking for one of those little springs bubbling up around my computer. As always, the challenge is to make sure I bring a big enough crock.

In any event, it is specifically because the sabbath is “built in” to the cosmos that vertical energies can enter and leave the “kingdom of man.” In other words, we aren’t trapped here below deck in the dark hull of the horizontal, merely sailing toward our doom. It is the reason why prayer, meditation, contemplation, lectio divina, and Petey's tin cup all work. These are all activities that make the vertical presence present, because they allow us to step outside the relentless stream of time and stand on the shore for a bit, "watching the river flow.” Through these inactivities, we may turn toward what is “behind” or “above” the external world and its nihilocracy of urgent nonsense.

Now critically, the purpose of the sabbath isn’t just to gear us up for the horizontal, a brief reprieve from the toil and drudgery of existence. Rather, the reverse is true. Although there is a rhythm and a dialectic between the sabbath and the mundane, in my view, the entire purpose of creation is the sabbath, not understood literally, but esoterically as our ever-present link to the whole. Keeping the sabbath holy is etymologically linked to the idea of “wholeness” and healing. I don’t intend to bash the left again... no, that's not true.... I do.... but one thing you will notice about “progressives” is that they are relentless. The idea of the sabbath is foreign to them, because it has been replaced by the idea of trying to force perfection in the horizontal, something which can never happen. For one thing, it is already happening. But only now. And now. And now.

In other words, you must occasionally step back from creation -- as did God -- and realize that it is already good. It is only for us to realize it. But this realization is more of a challenge than you might appreciate. Like the injunction against envy -- which is actually a reward and not an “order" -- the ability to truly experience “sabbath consciousness” is also a reward. It is something that most people have some difficulty achieving. Therefore, they displace their own inability to experience the simple joy of being, and project it into the future, when the revolution creates Sugar Candy Mountain on earth, when the minimum wage is increased, when everyone has free healthcare, and when all men have been castrated.

In short, progressives habitually turn an existential defect into a virtue, since politics is their religion, 24/7/365. To “remember” the sabbath would mean forgetting about the revolution, and that would be a political sin. They cannot separate church and state because the state is their church.

When we are caught up in the stream of time, the unity of reality is broken up into hopes, dreams, regrets, wishes, plans, resentments, etc. You cannot get away from these things so long as you are in time, because they are a function of time. The only way out is up and in, where we are called upon to live as if we are already in paradise. In truth, the sabbath is not a recollection but a “memoir of the future.” Here, the world does not need to be worked on or improved, merely enjoyed as it is. In a strange way, we would live in paradise if people were only capable of realizing that we already do.

After all, this present moment of your life is the end result of thousands and thousands of little plans, goals, choices, and decisions you have made over the course of your life. Are you able to step back for a moment and realize that this is it, that this moment is the result of your plans coming to fruition? Or are you in reality simply addicted to “planning” as a way to escape the moment? We live in a time undreamt of by kings and princes, but how many of us are able to simply enjoy it?

In the final unalysis, the sabbath must be internalized, so that one has access to it at all times, like a portable monastery, a zone of silence, a realm of inner peace between you and the world. For as much as you may think that you are in the world, the opposite is generally true. The world is in you -- it sinks its teeth into you and will not let go, which is why we have to consciously practice letting it go and “dying” to the world.

For the sabbath is also a rehearsal for the Big Sabbath, when it is dark and no man can work anyway. As Petey quipped in One Cosmos, “The paradox at the heart of the sabbath is that you must live your life as if you already abide in the eternal, because you do, but aspire to get there as if your life depended on it, because it does. The former is more difficult than the latter, because your worries, anxieties, plans, and conventional aspirations trick you into thinking there is another way out. And if you believe that, you are doing the adversary’s heavy lifting for him, and giving him his black sabbath rest.” Which is why Democrats are the adversarial party.

*****

Just. Wow. At dailykos, the beatification of the monster named Cho. In the morally insane world of the left, perpetrators are victims (HT: LGF).

43 Comments:

Bob, you wrote: "Did we get sidetracked, or can this be tied together with the fourth commandment of nihilism, which is forget the sabbath, because time has no vertical dimension anyway. And if time does not have a vertical dimension, then there is no developmental time, and therefore no telos for human beings -- nothing to achieve, no measurement of human maturity. We are all Alec Baldwin, who has often expressed interest in running for office. Then others can share in the feeling of what it is like to have such a beast as a father: a man who cannot even master a child. No, not his child -- which is what he imagines -- but his own childishness. The out-of-control child evokes the heavy-handed governmental parent who will coerce and control him as a substitute for self-mastery."

Gracian says: "Do Not Live In A Hurry. To know how to separate things is to know how to enjoy them. Many people finish their fortune sooner than their life. They run through pleasures without enjoying them, and would like to go back when they find they have overrun their mark. Postilions of life, they increase the ordinary pace of life by the hurry of their own calling. They devour more in one day than they can digest in an entire lifetime; they live in advance of pleasures, eat up the years beforehand, and by their hurry get through everything too soon. Even in the search for knowledge there should be moderation, lest we learn things better left unknown. We have more days to live through than pleasures. Be slow in enjoyment, quick at work, for people see work ended with pleasure, and pleasure ended with regret."

Clearly, Gracian's wisdom requires such a deeply embedded acknowledgement of the telos that it cannot be plainly seen and yet it rings through clearly.

Incredible. Added to the bottom of the post, in case you missed it: at dailykos, the beatification of the monster named Cho. In the morally insane world of the left, perpetrators are victims (HT: LGF).

"If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it."

They should heed this advice, if they weren't so 'fragile and lovable'.

Even my marigold seedlings are tougher than them - and they're just tiny plants!

Fabulous insights and teachings, Bob. But, of course, we can't have *that*.

And not to mean to single anything out as most important, yet, personally, I might-could have just experienced an inverse conversion reaction in response to reading your concept of a self of control which can't control itself, and therefore destructively tries to control everything else. I've thought the same thing and keep it handy in trying to understand what is going on within the horizontal plane, and lower.

Well, this seems like a good time to introduce some of you to Bridging. Much like the Sabbath is a way of bridging the horizontal with the vertical and being suspended and elongated in a spiral. Think of your spine and the center core of your body as spiral in shape. Breath is so important here because the air helps expand and elongate this spiral. Lay on your back with your knees bent and feet on the floor. They should be a little bit less than hip-width apart but not touching. Arms should relax by your side. If the shoulders are tight try turning the palms up and feel clavicle smile in a relaxed way. If your head is too far forward in normal posture, you may need to take your One Cosmos book and place it under your head. You may even need to buy a few more! It can be a mind-body One Cosmosis! Your throat should be relaxed and neck appear soft. Pelvis should be in a neutral position. Bridging is just about to start, that was just body alignment positioning.

(If you have bulging discs or flexion is contraindicated then do not tilt pelvis, just hinge up and down in a neutral position.) Inhale through the nose to prepare and let the lungs fill with air. Exhale as you tilt pelvis gently flattening back, squeeze the bottom part of your tush or sitz bones towards each other. This activates the hamstrings. Finally, lift the hips as you roll up the spine segmentally. Feel knees reaching over toes (technically they won't and your feet should be far enough away from your bottom to let knees align with ankles in hips up position). Inhale and hold this position. The pressure of the floor should be in the back between the shoulder blades and not in the neck. Lower hips a bit if you feel it in neck and reach arms long to keep shoulders down. Exhale, slowly roll down the spine segmentally all the way through the tailbone reaching it for the heels. Imagine a spiral elongating horizontally positioned. Eventually come back to the neutral position and continue to breathe. Do this 3 to 5 times. You can also place a small ball between knees and strengthen inner thighs with little pulses. The ball also helps people stay aligned in general.

I love my rude pig, I mean daughter, Gagdad!My friends all know it's perfectly normal to lose your cool a little bit every now and then.This wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for that rude pig dissing her Father!

With our friend a. baldwin being in the forefront of the national consciousness from the publicity of his little rant, perhaps you can re-visit and weave the theme of unregulated shame into your current discussion of the of the narcissist/nihilist bill of rights.It seems that this particular mental pathology has as much to do with the problems/injustices of the world, when shame ignited by narcissistic injury can mobilize aggressive behavior toward others, motivated by a need to restore the self, than any other I can think of. Instead of objectively dealing with the problem, the ego self perpetuates the drama into everything from a. baldwins rant, to an Iraqi, in order to save face, cutting off his sister's head after his buddies raped her.

Perhaps this is what leftists worldwide are projecting into George Bush as his motivation for the war in Iraq.

BTW, The fist two or three results from a Google search for unregulated shame came up with several of your posts. It actually did a better job than Blogger at finding the results I wanted.

"The leftist foregoes the task of mastering himself in favor of ceding his power to the collective." As well, foregoing the task of mastering oneself, in favor of telling others -- the collective -- how to live more "morally" and "responsibly."

Not [dreary required disclaimer] that all of his persuasion have all of his vices, or that others have none. /sigh/

A fine meditation. "Redeeming the time." I've noticed at my most selfish, narcissistic, and feckless, I am much more laissez-faire about the value and passage of time, than I am when more nearly in my right mind. Late, lazy, vague...

Lisa, I think many people use yoga or exercise itself as a kind of brief sabbath. There is so much beautiful lore about Shabbat (our "sister"?) that I'll bet you and Mrs. G. might be able to say more. I know it celebrates liberty, creation, and the foretaste of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Having learned that, it seems to be what the Nicene Creed ends with: "I look for the life of the world to come."

And Golfing Guy [who does appear to be amusing himself by a fake-querulous query]: do what you will. That is the whole of the law you seem to invoke. Any serious inquiry would involve putting deep questions to yourself, a hard look at the family systems, and a fast-forward to the eventual outcomes of your choices.

I followed the Cho link, it was my first visit to The Land of Koz. Can't say that I'll be spending much more time there.The article was rather random and disjointed, the comments, as far as I read, were more interesting. Looks as if some of the kids weren't buying it.

Great post today. As I read it, I had the sense that I was getting out of the city and into the the bright quiet sunshine of the country. I feel a thrill go down my spine when I realize I don't belong here, and am heading away from it all. How cool it that.

"Here, the world does not need to be worked on or improved, merely enjoyed as it is. In a strange way, we would live in paradise if people were only capable of realizing that we already do."

In my own naive way I've been saying for some time now - what if this is it? What if this is heaven? When I take Time to remember and return to that ground of being - my experience is transcendent, or to say it my way - Heavenly.

One year when I was teaching art full time in a little barrio public school, a new 5 year old, Columbian girl, the picture of angelic sweetness, entered school during the middle of the year and she loved art and she couldn't pronounce my last name (Evans). When she needed help with something she'd call out her name for me, and you know, hearing that angelic voice call me 'Miss Heaven' just sent me right back into that Sabbath, right there in the midst of a kindergarten class that could on the drop of a hat erupt into chaos or flow along in shared bliss - funny how some children affected me that way. She was one of my beloved teachers, as you all are, especially DL.

"A big part of the problem is that, once you have despiritualized a people, they will have a gigantic hole in the center of their being, which they will then attempt to fill either with material objects or with "thrills."

If playing golf or going with your wife to church doesn't prompt any deeper thought from you than that, might as well stick with golf - you won't find anything in church, and your wife will find someone else soon enough anyway.

Yes, unfortunately and fortunately, Pilates is hard to learn from reading or even a video. It is the most helpful to learn from a live person who can look at your body from an outside perspective and cue you according to your individual needs. Sometimes it comes off as a little elitist or arrogant but it's really all about alignment, centering and breath. The good part is that you can become independent with your practice and only check in with a live teacher according to your lifestyle. It is a luxury but well worth it when you forget about all your usual aches and pains and move through life a little more effortlessly. Us Coons are worth it.

Julie, your pictures are very good. The only minor point I would make clear, but you could not do with available symbols, is that when the hips are lifted they should be aligned with the knees and shoulders in a diagonal line. Take care not to allow ribs to flare open.

This is just an experiment, so if you have no idea what I am saying that's ok too! It might only be helpful to current students of Pilates or yoga. OT: Noticed a backyard explosion of hummingbirds today. They really love the aloe flowers.

Lisa,That's funny you mention hummingbirds - I've noticed a lot of them today, too, but I'm mystified as to why. I keep meaning to get a hummingbird feeder, in hopes I'll be able to get a couple pictures of the cute little rascals, but for now they're just too quick for me.

Today, Bob wrote,"So long as we are in the horizontal -- the horizontal alone -- we are indeed strangers in this world. “A raging animal inside of a dying carcass,” as I believe I once heard Alan Watts put it."

This reminded me of a similar passage by W.B. Yeats, from "Sailing to Byzantium," in which he referred to the human condition:

"Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is...."

Bob, great post as always. Indeed, mastery of the self is the great task of humanity...and the most impossible. Paul the apostole notes that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"...that being the impossibly high mountaintop where all of our wants, needs, desires and emotions are in full harmony with those of our Creator. Ironic isnt it, that mastery of the self begins with surrender of the self. That is something the left will never, never get; to them, self is supreme; "we all are our own saviours" is their anthem (one of the commentators in that Kos article used a quote from an Ian Anderson song, "Wondering Aloud", which said "and its only the giving that makes us what we are"; the quote "we are our own saviours" is from that same song; how funny is that??). But surrender of the self to the Higher Power is central to every religion that I know of (except that of the left); the surrender that Jesus and Paul speak of is not a forced surrender, but one of love, where we give up our own self sufficiency (not our actual self) because of our love for our Creator and our overwhelming desire to be united with Him. Mankind has had over 4000 years to get its act together apart from God, and, let's just say, we're not batting 1000. But anyone with the slightest hint of a vertical alignment could have predicted that.

BTW Walt, speaking of musical quotes, "thinking is the best way to travel" is a blurb from an old Moody Blues song which compares mental imaging to space travel (no doubt with the aid of LSD or Mescaline). It speaks of the Kos folks nostalgia for the 60's and 70's, a time of societal near-anarchy in this country (but with admittedly great music..LOL). I have always thought that many hard leftists are closet anarchists, hence their calls for open borders and resistance to law & order (this would also indicate authority issues, a sign of being stuck in adloescence).

1. Work out a compromise where you agree to go to church, but on Sunday evenings, or Wednesdays.2. Golf on Saturdays.3. Join a Seventh Day Adventist Church (just kidding there)4. Find something you can do with your buddies in the evening, like bowling or poker.

At the risk of being accused, as many of us recently were by a visiting commenter, of "currying favor" from Dear Leader, I'd like to try to connect a few passages in today's post.

Bob described the ritual of the sabbath "as a portal for energies from the eternal to enter the herebelow...to leave the field of time and to emphasize verticality, or eternity."

He said, "..."remembering the sabbath" has to do with vertical recollection..."

And toward the end mentioned, "...the sabbath must be internalized, so that one has access to it at all times, like a portable monastery, a zone of silence, a realm of inner peace between you and the world."

Now, here's the "currying favor" part - those phrases and ideas describe very exactly the "effect" that OC has in my life. What a gift! Among other things, it is the gift of "meaning" -- and it's always in stock!

(And speaking of gifts, and since I know someone has to pay for the beer and pizza, I'm heading for Petey's little cup, by way of saying "Thanks!")

Walt:Curry flavor is OK, but some folks like kung pao style, or black bean with bell pepper. Silver Palace has a good tangerine peel sauce, too, but that doesn't matter much if you're not around Whittier.And I can relate to Exec's problem, too. You know how Sunday services are- they start before sunrise, and nobody gets home until six or seven in the evening. Nonetheless, if he lives far enough north he could (in the summer, anyway) get out of church at six pm, and still have four hours of daylight left to golf.Go north, Exec!;)

Walt-Bob is more "in-famous"! Markos even gave Bob an award of some sort. No, wait! That was for the "most obnoxious man in the world" (or America, I dunno).Of course, the left don't know what in-famous means, so you know, I'm not sure if Bob will get a star on the walk of fame.

OH NO! A wound which will never heal. The inhumanity, what have I done!!!!!?If it makes you feel better I've just fired myself and gone into a relaxed, slack filled retirement.How else can I make this up to you.............?

Hey, on second thought, look on the bright side. I could have been REALLY cruel and called you Mr. Bean OR a nap........... Oh never mind.

"For the sabbath ultimately represents a shorthand way of discussing those little springs that dot the landscape of being, through which vertical energies bubble forth from the ground. Every night, before going to sleep, I make it a point to remember how and where I drank from one of these springs during the day. No matter how difficult my day, I can almost always remember some point at which I was “given my daily bread,” so to speak -- some point at which the vertical energies shone through and nourished me. "

kept sparking and percolating through my head yesterday and this morning. A new perspective on a neglected, nearly forgotten habit, and even the idea of nightly prayers.

In my neck of the woods---that is Australia---it has always been the so called "conservatives" who have been most active in promoting seven day a week, 24 hour trading.

I live in a small regional city. We recently had a referendum re the extension of trading hours.The status quo being, that most shops etc were closed on Sundays. This being a wise left over from the sabbath concept.

It was essentially so called "conservative" business interests---those that support "conservative" governments--- that lead to these restrictions being set aside.

The purpose of life is business--- business (and busyness) rules OK.No silence allowed.

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About Me

Location: Floating in His Cloud-Hidden Bobservatory, Inside the Centers for Spiritual Disease Control and Pretension, Tonga

Who?! spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!